Modernization, globality, and nationalism as cultural endeavours

The revival of nationalism in eastern Europe, in both humane and violent forms, invites a reconsideration of the theoretical perspectives in which it is most frequently viewed. Not only its vitality, but also its variety of forms needs to be accounted for.1

Social scientists have tended to explain nationalism either as a product of industrialization exacerbated by uneven economic development, or as a response to external domination and division of the territory claimed as sacredly one’s own, or else as a deflection from class struggle. In most of these explanations, nationalism is considered as in principle both temporary and abnormal.

It is evident that nationalism must also be viewed in relation to the continuing – but not continuous – modernization of culture and intensifying intercivilizational encounters, and interpreted as a perennial, not necessarily unhealthy feature of these processes.2 The theories previously referred to best explain not nationalism as a cultural or political programme, but its more extreme manifestations.

The conception of stratified modernization

Whether “early” or “late”, cultural modernization begs to be understood as a process that occurs on several levels and is capable of moving in opposite directions at different times or even simultaneously. First there are the modernizing thrusts toward individualism (recognition of the substantive claims of separate individualities), historicity (the conception of everything meaningful as created by human beings over time), impersonally systematized and functioning rationality, universalism (application of the same normative and legal standards to all human beings), and humanization (evaluation of rules by whether they benefit or harm human beings).

These thrusts produce a collection of thinking and acting practices so differentiated, abstract, and seemingly artificial that, at the “archaic” level of any tradition undergoing modernization, local, undifferentiated hierarchies, religious, political, or even medical, repeatedly reconstitute themselves. It is at this level that archaic nationalism, with its reliance on ex toto reasoning and heavy ritualization, arises. It is quite different from modernizing nationalism, of which the American case, with its ex parte logic and light ritualization, is a prototype.

What constitutes itself as archaic designs within modernizing cultures promises the restoration of some sense of undivided unity that is perceived to have been disrupted by modernization.3 While this process draws upon existing “survivals” for some or a great many of these raw materials, the restorationist energy derives from the dynamics generated by cultural modernization. The merely decorative uses of “folk culture” lack this energy.

In addition to its presumed antecedent, modernity also constructs its inverse (or rather an unpredictable assortment of inverses). What is affirmed in the modernizing process is rejected in anti-modernist reactions. But what is anti-modernist has absorbed the impact of modernization and carries it within its own attitudes even while presenting itself as its opposite. The anti-modernist phenomenon is not an “organic” wholeness. It rather manifests itself as one or another kind of repudiation (or “deconstruction”) of the several modernistic thrusts – traces of which it continues to carry within itself as its negative identity, its polemical context.

Insofar as the anti-modern is the inversion of the modernistic, it remains within the same “system” as the modernizing.4 But precisely in those respects in which the modernistic is continuous with the archaic, the anti-modernist spirit escapes the modernizing “system” by giving up its archaic premises. The anti-modernist rejects the legitimacy of hierarchy and duality, which are generally employed by the “system”-oriented modernizers as well as by many archaic reconstructionists, especially those who draw upon a background of monotheistic religion. (Western archaic reconstructionists who are inspired by traditional Asian religions or by a quest for a mythical women’s culture consciously reject hierarchic and dualistic models. These frequently creep in to what they construct nevertheless.)

There is also a structurally problematic but ever-reviving egalitarian, democratic-culture, “leftist”, “life-world”-oriented stream of cultural modernization. It tends to flow over into anti-modernism, but ought to be distinguishable from the latter by the continued affirmation of rationality, historicism, individuality, humanism, and universalism – “the unfinished project of the Enlightenment” (model: Habermas) at its most mystical, that is without hierarchy or duality in it. The disconnectedness from everything archaic is most complete here.

The anti-modernist seeks either an inversion of the symbolic structure of modernity or its annihilation. In the latter case, as a result of the repudiation of both archaic and modernizing principles of order as well as of the directional orientations (“meta-narratives”) of modernism, there arises in anti-modernist culture a strong tendency toward cognitive incoherence. This is in sharp contrast to various versions of the modernizing culture that may conflict with each and refuse to be ontologically or metaphysically grounded but which are generally, in each case, ideologically only too coherent.

The anti-modernist is, in historically and cross-culturally variable forms, virtually synchronous with the modernizing. It seems analytically efficient in sociological usage to reserve the concept of the postmodern to either (a) perceptions of unmotivated side-by-side presences of elements of modernizing projects and anti-modernist reactions to them (the aggregative or assemblage phase of postmodernity), or (b) efforts to establish connections between them (the configurational or bridge-building phase of postmodernity, these phases being possible steps of its cultural maturation).5

We argue that cultural modernization is a process occurring necessarily, though not always simultaneously, on three levels: the modernizing-anti-modernist split at the centre of the process; archaic restorationist programmes in its depths (where the “inner demons” not only of Europe are most likely to be generated6): postmodern reconfigurations of differentiated entities in the outer space of its most experimental enterprises.

Essential to this conception are the different modes by which elements on each “level” of the process are integrated – to use a traditional term – into systems or networks of mutually comprehensible meanings. On the archaic level, the mode of integration is that of a particularistic hierarchy of values. The principle of symbolic hierarchy is retained in most versions of the modernizing project, but to be valid any modern hierarchy – as well as any modern equality – must make claims to universality. (The universalizing thrust, originating in the monotheistic religions, accounts for much of the “totalitarian temptation” in modern culture – but also for an prescriptive theory of modernization or of “universal civilization”.)

Anti-modernist reactions generally do not take cultural integration as a serious issue (or they treat it as an incomprehensible mystery). Anti-modernism is strongly motivated by a reactions against established hegemonies which both archaic and modernistic cultures may be employed to legitimate, whether under the aegis of a god or of nature, reason, or history.

But the result of suspicion of everything that way allow hegemonic control is that anti-modernism comes to rely on the aesthetic imagination alone and becomes a form of literature or theatre, but not in sufficient measure a crucible of practical responsibilities. It thus forfeits the capacity, which any viable culture must possess, of gathering and protecting.

This capacity is at least latent – though also fragile – in what is here conceived of as postmodern culture. This type of culture does not rely on hierarchic designs into which both archaic and modernizing cultures slip easily, though sometimes unintentionally. Postmodern culture can best be described as a collection of a large, potentially unlimited number of modes of discourse in which one mode is not in principle subject to the control of any other. It attains its own version of cultural integration through unexpected resonances among modes of discourse that have been separated by the modernizing project into differentiated realms of aesthetics, morality, and politics, or into religious and secular modes of thought, or into oppositions between “tradition” and “modernity”, the “global” and the “local”.

In postmodern culture, the differentiation of spheres of life and of culture accomplished by modernity is not only taken for granted but affirmed as a liberating advance. But while modernizing culture stops here (and ends up in the closed circle of infinite fragmentation), postmodern culture, as here conceived, opens itself up to the possible congenialities, or resonances, or even partial conjunctions among that which modernity has torn asunder.

If archaic restorationism remains a cultural and does not become a political programme, the main risk is that it will retard the development of those who identify with it (unless they find a futuristic language for talking about the archaic or, vice versa, by coming “closer to the archaic sources of the national language”, manage “to say things which had not been said before”).7 The modernizing thrust possesses tremendous destructive but also self-correcting capacities. Anti-modernist reactions contribute a great deal of vitality to present-day expressive culture, but also feed antinomian tendencies in contemporary life, to which a “normative reaction to normlessness is a frequent response.

The greatest dangers in cultural modernization arise from a politicized conflation of the modernistic with the archaic – when a culture aspiring to modernism organizes itself in an archaic manner, as until recently in the Soviet Union, or when archaic culture adapts modernistic technical means to its purposes, as in Nazi Germany.8 When religious fundamentalism, especially of the monotheistic type, merges with a political purpose, it tends to follow the latter course.

From intercivilizational encounters to the polylogue of civilizations

We now shift to another analytical model – that of globalization theory, which proclaims that the world is becoming “a single”, though not a unified, “place”.9 It is approaching a condition in which ontological understandings entertained in its various parts (though not necessarily of all of its parts at all times) impinge upon the making of decisions in any part.

But one takes part in the world through one’s own particular civilization. Whatever might be said about the emergence of a “central civilization”,10 particular civilizations still provide taken-for-granted symbolic frames in contemporary relations of Islam and the West, or East or South Asia and the West, or Islam and South Asia. A civilizational frame is evident even when “internationalism” or “cosmopolitanism” are consciously asserted – usually as versions of Western modernism. The surviving civilizations possess a vital comprehensiveness of symbolic organization that imparts a large-scale and deeply grounded, though frequently latent, self-confidence of which those who subsist outside of the “world-historically significant socio-cultural formations are deprived.

To be sure, contemporary civilizations are (as perhaps the ancient Near Eastern civilization were between 1700 and 500 BC)11 in the process of self-reconstruction as a result of modernization and inter-civilizational encounters. The maintenance of their own identities has become problematic, and indeed one of the main issues in contemporary civilizational studies.12

In the course of globalization, immemorial but limited intercivilizational encounters13 are transformed into a continuous, all-affecting polylogue of civilizations. The polylogue is becoming the growing edge and the reality test of worldwide cultural relations. Particular ethnic-national and religious-ideological traditions survive in their distinctiveness (as they did when civilizations were forming). But these traditions are overlaid both by the larger civilizational frameworks which they have been absorbing or resisting for millennia, and, superimposed upon them, by a new, “global” flow of communication, which challenges, modifies, and revitalizes both the civilizational frameworks and the particular traditions within them, producing new “mediatorial bodies, spaces, and cultures”.

On the surface level of this flow, inter-civilizational relations rely heavily on mutual borrowing. Due to various kinds of developmental unevenness and differential power, borrowing can be highly asymmetrical. Asymmetrical borrowing – including the acceptance of imposed stereotypes – constitutes cultural domination.

But even while borrowing takes place on the surface level, mutual criticism occurs on a deeper level – and this can be symmetrical even when uneven development and power differentials are present. It is as serious mutual criticism that the polylogue of civilizations can become the seedbed of contemporary spirituality, the grounding of the vital thrusts of literature, religion, psychiatry, and sociology.

Within the globalizing frame of consciousness, mutual criticism acquires a two-way communicative structure. On the one hand, everyone is sooner or later constrained to seek justification of one’s own behaviour in a “universally understandable” language – that is, its explanation either by reference to globally accepted goals or by some demonstration of the empirical consequences of accepting one or another set of premises. On the other hand, one is constantly engaged in judging the “universal understandings” – that is, the globally accepted goals and the assumptions of “empiricism” – by one’s own (though not necessarily “traditional”) values and in the light of one’s own historical and current experience.14

“One’s own” refers here to collectivities having direct access to the polylogue of civilizations – that is, principally nations, “world” religions, and transnational ideological movements. With few exceptions, individuals take part only in the cultural processes of their own nations or ideological communities.15 Only through them do any considerable numbers of people enter into the polylogue of civilizations, the largest socio-cultural configuration within which their nations are embedded, but which some “world” religions and ideological movements have acquired the capacity partly to transcend. (This they can apparently do only if they are unable to control “their own” civilizations: the ability to universalize is paid for by the loss of power to define the particular.)

The need to justify one’s own nation, religion, or movement in a “universally understandable” language arises from the increased political and moral relevance of the world system of communications ranging from science to literature to journalism – anything beyond the purely instrumental exchanges of messages in multinational economic and political relations. The judging of what functions, at any given time, as “universal understandings” by one’s own standards and experiences becomes a necessary response, by members of any self-respecting collectivity, to the impact upon them of “international” or “world” systems of communication.

The polylogue of civilizations is not likely to engage, except by its marginal effects, the broad “general population”. Its primary social supports will be the universities, world media, international professional associations, and movements concerned with peace, the environment, human rights, and cultural criticism – to the extent that they are all set up in such a way as not to consist of “official representatives” of nations or ideological bodies; and, on the other hand, are not committed to some blandly programmatic “world citizenship”. Such social formations are most apt to effect political decision-making if influential circles within them are neither totally absorbed into national political elites nor completely alienated from them.16

The universal justification – particular judgment dialectic allows civilizations, nations within them, and multinational religions and ideological movements to retain non-provincial cultural vitality (and a sense of realism) even when inundated by borrowings from elsewhere, whether of “high” or of “mass” culture. It is thus a precondition for the maintenance of civilizational identities in today’s world. And also a contemporary definition of “being civilized”.

The globalizing process poses problems for postmodern culture which the latter, in its perpetually unfinished, exploratory condition, may lack firmness of shape and balanced self-confidence to be able to resolve. Unless the postmodern is rooted in something other than itself, it falls short in stabilizing capacity, reliable moral commitments, even practical judgment.

But other forms of modernizing culture are no better in providing guidance in coming to grips with globalization. Anti-modernist culture, in dissolving reliable structures of meaning into “simulacra”,17 cannot sustain anything (or, in contrast to modernist culture, provide the basis for any institutions other than those of advertising-based mass-consumption markets). On the other hand, modernistic culture, in its uniformitarian rationalism, becomes formal, hegemonistic, over-explicit, mind-bogglingly cumbersome. Even the practical gifts it distributes to grateful recipients turn out to be means for subduing, absorbing, or exhausting the vitality of the identities of other. And archaic restorationism is always provincial, with unbridgeable gaps between groups: tears only for the fallen on one’s own side, perpetual chewing of one’s own totemic beast in the cultural journals.

For these reasons, I hypothesize that viable responses to the challenges of globalization can be produced only by culturally stratified entities – that is, by nations, churches or civilizational movements which incorporate into their symbolic designs the modernistic-antimodernist split, archaic restorationist programmes, and postmodern resonances – and are not so uncomfortable about the differences of content and accent among them as to become either rigidly polarized or frenetically stagnated.

Neither science nor a generalized “religion of humanity” can become a viable response to globalization, if only because neither is capable of generating a genuine archaic element in which particular communities are grounded. Stratified modernizing cultural systems – not only religion but also nationalism – are better qualified to respond to globalization.

Nationalism as cultural movements

As distinguished from an ethnie and a state, a nation is an imagined community not only of participation but also of destiny; thought of as either a representation in action of a “natural” language or as the creation of a series of more or less spontaneous collective decisions to establish a joint form of existence; and in fact held together over historical time both by a shared but distinctive set of cultural premises and an evolving political purpose respected at any time by most people who are presumed to be its members.18

Nationalism is a conception of the cultural identity of a nation which becomes a political programme for a movement even when the nation is (as to some extent it always is) in the process of being invented. The close identification of culture with politics is perhaps the most general source of dangers which nationalism has presented not only to the world, but to the members of the nations it sought to represent, to revive, or to “build”. This identification gives to nationalism a deeper, quasi-religious kind of power, an ability to overwhelm, which “normal” political forces generally lack. It leads to the exploitation of culture by politics.

Democracy benefits from loosening the connections between culture and politics, so that important symbolic quests cannot be monopolized by particular political forces.19 Like religion, nationalism operates optimally in a democratic setting when it is distributed over a range of political organizations and over a series of cultural programmes, the two distributions far from coinciding with each other, and not divided rigorously along the lines of “majority” and “minority” groups. In what follows we will be mainly concerned with nationalism as cultural programmes.

Nationalism is similar to other civilization-shaping movements of the last two centuries – from Romanticism to feminism – in that it relates to all the levels of cultural modernization. In nineteenth-century Germany and eastern Europe and present-day Near East, nationalism tends in its cultural form toward the archaic. American nationalism (and, to a lesser extent, mainstream French nationalism since the Revolution) have been modernizing.20 The crucial issue in distinguishing modernizing from archaic nationalism is whether one derives society from individuals having “human rights” or perceives the latter as embodiments of the “collective soul” or “dignity” of the nation. 21

Nationalism acquires an archaic form when the nation to which it is oriented still needs to be artificially constructed from tribal entities, as currently in sub-Saharan Africa, where what in Europe would be “archaic” may appear as an advance from the “primordial”. In India, a more complex “archaic-modernizing” nation-building has not reconciled its conflicting aspects. In the Soviet Union a programme, modernistic in its goals but archaic in its organizations, to force “Soviet patriotism” on a largely unwilling multinational population failed.

Some less stable twentieth-century forms of nationalism, of the “blood and soil” variety (and fascism), contain strong components of attitudinal anti-modernism.22 It seems possible to identify a postmodern nationalism in some intellectual leaders of the current upheaval in central and eastern Europe (Vaclav Havel). Anticipations of it, in tension with archaic thinking, could be found as early as in Mazzini,23 whose cast of mind may in fact be closer to that of today’s Central European nationalism than Havel’s.

The four basic types of nationalism and their various mixes are specific foci of crystallization, popular transmission and testing of cultural modernization and can be expected, in its course, to recur. But an analysis of the more fully developed phenomena of nationalism – those which endure in contemporary nations – is likely to reveal the presence somewhere in their configurations of elements located on all levels of cultural modernization, and appealing to different groups in varying intensities. Only this kind of nationalism, in any case, is likely to measure up to the demands by which cultures are now being judged.

Nations are not the only foci of crystallization of such cultural processes. But nationalism (in this respect comparable to the “traditional” religions) refers more than the other civilizational movements of modernity to a community that is grounded in everyday practices, and is “complete” in including, at least potentially, the widest range of individuals regularly active in it. For these reasons, nationalism has proved to possess a reality-rootedness and resiliency superior to that of other civilizational movements of modernity and is likely to persist or keep reviving for a long time to come.

Since nationalism and religion appear to be the only major sociosymbolic entities that are both (a) deeply grounded in actual communities embracing all aspects of life and including in their membership people of all ages, both sexes, in principle different races, occupations, and a wide range of specific ideologies, and (b) extending in their symbolic designs persuasively over all levels of modernizing culture, they are likely to prove the most equally effective competitors.

However, the relationships between religion and nationalism have been diverse. A part of this diversity may be accounted for by the level of cultural modernization of each phenomenon. The following hypotheses are proposed: (1) If an archaic nationalism and a fundamentalist religion seek to control the same population, they aim at a fusion-type alliance in which one side is absorbed into the other. (2) Modernistic nationalism should be able to sustain a “normal-working” relationship with modernistic religion (e.g., American mainline Protestantism), tolerant, mutually benevolent, with areas of cooperation and conflict controlled by mutually acceptable laws. (3) Modernistic nationalism is likely to improvise its relationship to fundamentalist religions, by either using them in limited ways for its own purposes (e.g., in defending a threatened nation against its enemies) or by treating them in a manner established for and accepted by modernistic religions. In the first case, fundamentalist religion tends to prove stronger than modernist nationalism, as in Arab countries; in the second case, the outcome depends on how strongly modernist political premises have become general culture, as in the US. (4) Archaic nationalism can only be hostile to modernistic religion.

As a collective enterprise of maintaining a deeply rooted cultural identity in the everyday practices of an actually operating society-wide community, nationalism is likely to function as one of the survival tests of contemporary expressive culture. What survives among the constantly generated cultural phenomena presumably depends on (1) their formal perfection, (2) their cognitive comprehensiveness (that is, ability to achieve non-reductive simplification of complex experiences), (3) their practical effects (including objectively demonstrable pathological consequences), but also (4), in modern times, their bearing up in the various national struggles for “full development” of collective identity. The only question is: what kind of nationalism will persist and perform as one of the survival tests of contemporary culture?

How much weight the various possible components of nationalism will acquire in a particular case presumably depends on the raw materials of religious and political tradition which a nation can draw upon in modernizing its cultures,24 on the current interplay of influential groups in a society, and on its international setting. The most important issue in contemporary studies of nationalism is whether conditions can be identified which promote either a militant or a humane (that is, neither repressive nor violent) kind of nationalism.

Comparative economic failure, perceived externally generated cultural inundations, a widespread sense of anomie, and large influxes of immigrants differing in language, religion, or physical characteristics appear to be among the conditions that reduce the likelihood of nationalism taking a humane aspect.25 All of these conditions are likely to become more prevalent during globalization and may set off militant reactions to the polylogue of civilizations. In addition, unsettled territorial claims, particularly those concerned with archaic (and therefore uncompromisable) sacred spaces (the Kosovo fields for the Serbs) and centres (Jerusalem), promote virulent nationalism.

The symbolic design of nationalism may be as important as external social conditions. While there are “traditional” cultures of moderation into which nationalism may be absorbed,26 I would expect that in today’s world humane nationalism will depend on a strong presence in its symbolic designs of postmodern culture,27 and on the participation of its bearers in the polylogue of civilizations, in sustained efforts to justify one’s own behavior in a universally understandable language, and simultaneously to judge these universal understandings by one’s own values and one’s own experiences.

This is a position which nationalist intellectuals can take without compromising either their intellect or their identity and without becoming flabby or naive. It is likely that, responding to the inevitable challenges of globalization, a significant fraction of them will continue to take such positions.